PayPay, SoftBank raise $879.8 million in US IPO

PayPay Corp., a Japanese digital payments leader, and a unit of SoftBank Group raised $879.8 million in an initial public offering (IPO) launched last week in the US, japantimes.co.jp reported, noting that it was the largest listing by a Japanese company on a US stock exchange in a decade.

Tokyo-based PayPay priced its initial public offering of American depositary receipts (ADRs) at $16 per share, below the $17-$20 range. An ADR represents one ordinary share.

The company sold 31.1 million ADRs, while a unit of SoftBank Vision Fund II, the investment arm of conglomerate SoftBank Group, sold 23.9 million ADRs, the issuer said in a statement.

At the IPO price, PayPay has a market value of about $10.7 billion based on listed shares, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

PayPay has delayed the start of formal marketing of the offering amid uncertainty over the Middle East conflict. The IPO attracted orders from institutional investors that far exceeded the ADRs available before the price was set.

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and a division of the Qatar Investment Authority, along with a subsidiary of U.S. payments giant Visa Inc., have agreed to buy shares worth a total of up to $220 million, according to documents filed with the authority. The IPO includes an unlisted public offering in Japan of about 8.7 million ADRs offered by Mizuho Financial Group at the same price as the U.S. offering.

PayPay's IPO is the largest by a Japanese company to debut in the U.S. since the listing of mobile messaging service Line, which raised $1.3 billion in an offering in Tokyo and New York in 2016, according to Bloomberg data.

According to SEC filings, PayPay posted a profit of 103.3 billion yen ($656 million) on revenue of 278.5 billion yen in the nine months ended December 2025, compared with a profit of 28.96 billion yen on revenue of 220.4 billion yen in the same period the previous year.

PayPay emerged in 2018 as a joint venture with Paytm, an Indian payments company backed by Vision Fund. Shortly after its launch, the company surpassed Rakuten Group's Rakuten Pay in user acquisition, thanks to heavy marketing, aggressive subsidies and SoftBank's support in attracting users from merchants in Japan. As of December 2025, the number of PayPay users exceeded 72 million in a country of about 123 million people.

QR codes accounted for 9.6% of all cashless transactions in Japan in 2024, up from 0.2% in 2018, according to the Economy Ministry. Credit cards accounted for 82.9%, but that share has been declining.

PayPay, majority owned by SoftBank Group and SoftBank Corp., has been ramping up its overseas expansion efforts ahead of its global offering. Last year, PayPay began making its service available at more than two million stores in South Korea for Japanese customers. In February, the company announced a partnership with Visa to explore opportunities in the U.S.

PayPay's IPO comes as SoftBank is monetizing more assets to fund new investments in artificial intelligence. The technology investor announced that it has sold nearly $13 billion worth of T-Mobile U.S. shares between June and December 2025 alone.

SoftBank Group is expected to control about 92% of PayPay's voting power following the IPO.

The public offering was led by Goldman Sachs Group, JPMorgan Chase, Mizuho and Morgan Stanley. The company debuted on the Nasdaq Global Select market on March 12, under the symbol "PAYP," with its ADRs up 13.5% to $18.16.